“Self-centered” is too puny a term for Elyot and Amanda of Noel Coward’s “Private Lives.” They do care about others — specifically, about whether those others also are paying proper attention to Elyot and Amanda.

If this once-married, forever feuding (yet hopelessly smitten) pair knew there was a play about them, each naturally would expect to be at its center. In Cygnet Theatre’s stylish, lively and altogether pretty exquisite staging of the 1930 comedy, it turns out one of them is right.

Though it might be just the prickly, sharp-witted appeal of her character, it sure feels as if Shana Wride’s beguiling performance is what shifts the play’s gravitational axis to Amanda.

Wride glides through this carnival of heartache and horrid behavior with a fixed smile and a crisp intuition for Coward’s quintessentially British banter. Yet there’s nothing oblivious about her Amanda. Wride, re-emerging here after a decade away, makes the character seem liberated by a weary resignation, by her stated belief that “everything happens by chance.”

Amanda’s doggedly blithe spirit stands in contrast to the sourpuss Elyot, played with a snippy panache by Sean Murray, Cygnet’s artistic director. (This is the role Coward himself played in the original production of “Private Lives.”)

Murray makes a fitting foil for Wride, although the portrayal is enough on the dry side that when Elyot blunders into his first meeting with Amanda after their bitter divorce, his expressions of shock can seem a little affected. (It’s really in the last act of the three-act play, when Elyot comes closest to being rattled, that Murray shines the most, and earns the biggest laughs.)

That initial meeting happens at a French seaside resort where both Elyot and Amanda, clearly not people who travel econo-class, are honeymooning with their respective new spouses. As chance would have it (no wonder Amanda is such a believer), the two couples have adjacent rooms and terraces.

Andrew Hull has designed the terraces to look like lush jewels set into a cerulean-blue frame, accented by Eric Lotze’s dappled, undulating lighting and Matt Lescault-Wood’s subtle but insistent sounds of the sea.

Elyot’s new wife, Sybil, is a fussy younger woman who recoils at the idea of so much as a sunburn. Jessica John, who’s turning into a specialist with these peculiar Brit characters (she also had memorable turns in the Cygnet comedies “Noises Off” and “Communicating Doors”), gives her a fittingly clipped humor.

She also lends Sybil a comically odd little giggle that really ought to get its own Equity card.

Fernandes, also a Cygnet regular, brings a suitably uptight feel to the part. Amid the posh patois of these characters, his accent took time to warm up on opening night, but as a straight man he’s straight-up solid.

The sparks fly when the two couples inevitably discover each other staying next door. While Victor and Sybil make the polite best of it, Elyot and Amanda go from mutual sniping to reluctant expressions of abiding affection — and so starts the pattern that runs throughout the play.

Over and over, the two shift from adoration to accusations at the drop of a brandy glass, and the way they pinball deliciously from love to hate and back again continues as they flee to Amanda’s Paris flat (another of Hull’s sumptuous sets). They’re pursued, naturally, by the jilted spouses.

The only solution they find to the sniping is to invent a kind of timeout, reciting the words “Solomon Isaacs” (later shortened to just “sollocks”) to signal it’s time to chill.

In the context of this complex relationship, the Coward song “Someday I’ll Find You,” on which Wride and Murray have a sweet little duet, takes on unsettling undertones — a love song as stalker ballad.

That last aspect is accented by Elyot’s latent tendencies toward violence and misogynism. By today’s standards, a line like “Certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs,” is so horrendously un-P.C. it would leave Coward DOA.

But Murray, who co-directs the show skillfully with Cygnet associate artistic director Francis Gercke, takes care to place such attitudes within Elyot and the play’s peculiar little universe.

Its inhabitants are costumed beautifully by Shirley Pierson, heightening the contrast at the heart of the play — the power of appearances to deceive.

“I doubt many people are completely normal, deep down in their private lives,” as Amanda says. These particular people may be pretty, but those private lives? Not so much.

A review of Cygnet Theatre's "Private Lives" in Monday's Union-Tribune misquoted a line from the play. The correct line is: "Certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs." The Union-Tribune regrets the error.